Many people justifiably view the Internet as a vast playground in which they are free to express themselves virtually without consequence. Recent legal trends, however, seem to be leading us down a different path. US Corporations have been coming down hard with litigation – and often winning – against individuals for offenses as seemingly innocuous as writing Negative Reviews or downloading publicly available information. It has become more important than ever to stay on top of these cases and know what can get you in trouble these days. We’ve been keeping track and have compiled a list of recent and classic cases regarding your dwindling freedom of speech online.

Sticks and Stucko

Since June, Zillow has been threatening to sue a blogger (McMansion Hell) for using some of its images for parody – effectively poking fun at the poorly conceived architecture often featured throughout the site’s real estate listings. Although the blogger was not even badmouthing Zillow itself, the company still took offense, stating in an absurd cease-and-desist letter that the blog may interfere “with Zillow’s business expectations and interests.”

This is frighteningly broad language from a legal perspective. Is this to mean that citizens are expected to consider the ‘business expectations and interests’ of any company they happen to discuss in public? Furthermore, the images being shared were all sourced to their original owners and since they were used for parody, fall under “fair use“.

For now, this exchange has been limited to letters, but keep an eye on this issue – Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (to name a few) all have made equally dubious claims about their content, stating that anything uploaded to their service automatically becomes their property.

Like It or Shut It

Another recent case began when it appeared that a wedding photographer was holding a customer’s photos hostage, pending payment of a disputed fee. Rather than paying the fee, the newlyweds took to Social Media and began publishing negative reviews about the photographer. In short, the photographer’s reputation was ruined and she eventually had to close up shop.

The photographer then came back and sued the couple for publishing the negative reviews, stating that the reviews amounted to defamation. Sure enough, the court sided in the photographer’s favor and awarded more than $1 million in damages. This sets legal precedent going forward that negative online reviews can be interpreted as full on defamation.

Really Silly Syndication

Arguably, companies publish information on their website to help spread the word – to get their message out to as many people as possible. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was developed as a standard protocol for sharing information across websites. These feeds can also be subscribed to by individuals who then receive an update whenever new content is published. So what’s the problem with consuming all this free information? Generally, nothing – but if a company doesn’t like what you do with their information, they may have grounds to sue you.

Take the 2011 California court case of Craigslist vs. 3Taps for example. In this case, 3Taps had been feeding publicly syndicated information from Craigslist to its own service. Craigslist decided that they didn’t like what 3Taps was doing with their information and blocked their IP addresses from accessing Craigslist. In response, 3Taps simply changed its IP addresses to get around the block. This eventually lead to a court ruling that changing your IP address in order to access a public website from which you had been blocked is illegal.

In a similar case, it was ruled that Power.com had violated an anti-hacking law when it changed its IP addresses in order to regain access to Facebook after it had been blocked for gathering publicly accessible information from the social media giant.

Don’t Scrape Me

Presently, a small company called hiQ is locked in a high-stakes battle over its practice of “scraping” information from LinkedIn. Scraping is a type of bot activity whereby large amounts of information can be gathered and indexed for use elsewhere. Archive.org, for example, scrapes millions of pages of information from all around the web and indexes them for tomorrow’s nostalgia.

When LinkedIn sent hiQ a cease-and-desist letter warning that their behavior violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a controversial 1986 law that makes computer hacking a crime, hiQ responded by suing LinkedIn.

The result of this suit could determine whether the CFAA can be used to curtail the use of scraping tools across the web. The CFAA makes it a crime to “access a computer without authorization or exceed authorized access.” Courts have been struggling to figure out what this means ever since Congress passed it more than 30 years ago.

One plausible reading of the law – the one LinkedIn is advocating – is that once a website operator asks you to stop accessing its site, you are committing a crime if you don’t comply. The contrary interpretation is that by running a public website, a company is implicitly giving the general public authorization to access it and those permissions cannot be rescinded on a case-by-case basis. Both are plausible interpretations of the law, which makes this a very interesting case to track.